WikiLeaks (25 page)

For Julian Assange – like Jason Bourne, the Hollywood secret agent constantly on the run from the CIA – elaborate security precautions may have been second nature. But for journalists used to spilling secrets down at the pub after a gossipy pint or two they were a new and tricky-to-master art form. Katz and Rusbridger borrowed inspiration from
The Wire
, the cult US drama series set amid the high rises and drug dealers of Baltimore. The noir show was popular among some of the
Guardian
’s staff; in it, the dealers typically relied on “burners”, or pay-as-you-go phones, to outsmart the cops.

Katz therefore asked his assistant to go out and buy 20 burner phones for key members of the cables team. The
Guardian
now had its own leak-proof network. Unfortunately, nobody could remember their burner number. At one point Alan Rusbridger sent a text from his “burner” to Katz’s regular cellphone – an elementary error that in
The Wire
would almost certainly have prompted the cops to swoop. The
Guardian
editor picked up another burner during a five-day trip to Australia. When he got back to London Katz called him on that number. The conversation – routed right round the world – fizzled out after just three minutes when Katz ran out of credit. “We were basically completely useless at any of the spooky stuff,” Katz confesses.

Like
El País
, the
Guardian
had deployed a team of experts and foreign correspondents for a thorough final sift through the cables. Some – such as the
Guardian
’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding – were physically recalled to London for security reasons. Other foreign staff accessed the cables remotely via a VPN (virtual private network) connection. Ian Traynor in Brussels examined cables referring to the European Union, Nato and the Balkans; Declan Walsh, the
Guardian
’s correspondent in Islamabad, looked at Afghanistan and Pakistan; David Smith did Africa and Jason Burke took on India.

Other reporters included Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill and Latin America correspondent Rory Carroll in Caracas. (Carroll’s VPN connection quickly packed up, making it impossible to eyeball the Chávez cables.) Simon Tisdall, Ian Black and Jonathan Steele, all immensely experienced, combed through the cables on the Middle East and Afghanistan. The sheer range of journalistic expertise that five major international papers were throwing at the data would perhaps demonstrate the value of the world’s remaining MSM. They could be the genuine information professionals, standing out in an otherwise worthless universe of internet froth.

Sitting in the fourth-floor bunker, Harding and a colleague, reporter Robert Booth, were among those who would spend long hours staring, increasingly dizzy eyed, at the dispatches. It soon became clear that there was an art to interrogating the database. If your search term was too big – say, “Britain”, or “corruption” – the result would be unfathomably large. The search engine would announce: “More than 1,000 items returned.” The trick was to use a relatively unusual name. Better still was to experiment with something off the wall, or even a bit crazy. Putting in “Batman”, for example, yielded just two results. But one was a delightful cable in which a US diplomat noted that “Dmitry Medvedev continues to play Robin to Putin’s Batman.” The comparison between the Russian president and his prime minister would whizz round the world, and prompt a stung Vladimir Putin to accuse the United States of “arrogance” and unethical behaviour.

Likewise, punching in the search term “vodka” popped the cork on unexpected results: drunken meetings between US ambassadors and central Asian despots; a memorable wedding in Dagestan in which Chechnya’s president – the murderous Ramzan Kadyrov – danced with a gold-plated revolver stuck down his trousers; and a Saudi Arabian sex party that spoke volumes about the hypocrisy of the Arab state’s princely elite.

In contrast to the staccato jargon of the war logs, the cables were written in the kind of prose one might expect from Harvard or Yale. Harold Frayman had improvised the original search engine used to sift the much smaller Afghan and Iraq war logs. By now he had improved these techniques. “I’m a journalist. I knew what we were going to look for,” he explains. “Diplomats were much more verbose than squaddies in the field. They knew longer words.”

The data set contained more than 200 million of those words. Frayman had originally used the computer language Perl to design the Afghan and Iraq databases. He describes it as a “very well developed set of bits of software … It did little jobs very tidily.” For the cables Frayman added refinements. Journalists were able to search the cables sent out by individual embassies. In the case of Iran, which had not had a US mission since the 1970s, most of the relevant diplomatic chatter actually came out of the US embassy in Ankara. It was therefore helpful to be able to quickly collect up the Ankara embassy output.

Of the files, 40% were classified confidential and 6% secret. Frayman created a search by five detailed categories: secret/noforn (that is, not to be read by non-Americans); secret; confidential/ noforn; confidential; and unclassified. There was no top-secret: such super-sensitive material had been omitted from the original SIPRNet database, along with a substantial number of dispatches that the state department in Washington considered unsuitable for sharing with its colleagues in the military and elsewhere. There were idiosyncrasies in the data: for example, very little material from Israel seemed to be circulated: suggesting that the US embassy there did not play an intimate role in the two-way dealings between Tel Aviv and Washington, and was largely kept out of the loop.

“Secret” was the place for the rummaging journalists to start. Some of these searches produced remarkable scoops. Many, however, did not. The secret category, it soon emerged, tended to cover a limited number of themes: the spread of nuclear material
and nuclear facilities; military exports to Iran, Syria and other states considered unsavoury; negotiations involving top-ranking US army personnel. By far the largest number of stories came from lower classified documents.

Like the other reporters, Harding and Booth soon found themselves developing their own quirky search techniques. They discovered it was often useful to start at the bottom, working backwards from a country’s most recent cables, written as they were up to 28 February 2010. Such searches became, however, an exercise in stamina; after reading a batch of more than 40 cables, the reporters had to take a break. Adjacent to the secret bunker was a free coffee machine. There was also a relaxation room. “Here, after a long session of cable-bashing, you could at least flick the sign to engaged, grab a cushion and lie groaning on the floor,” says Harding. Katz said the company would pay for massages: but none of the
Guardian
’s weary cable slaves had time to spare.

To editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, the abundant disclosures pouring out of the US cables at first seemed like a player hitting the jackpot every time in an amusement arcade. He recalled how Leigh – after reading the material for a couple of weeks over the summer, chortling and astonished – had come back with enough stories for 10 splashes, articles that could lead the newspaper front page. “It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough,“ Rusbridger says.

The analogy is a good one. But it perhaps makes the task sound too easy. To comb properly through the data, teams of
Guardian
staff had to be recruited. The reporters, especially the foreign correspondents, brought much to the table: contextualisation, specialist knowledge and a degree of entrepreneurship in divining what to look for. All these skills were needed to turn the cables into significant newspaper stories.

Leigh sent a memo to Rusbridger:

We’ve now got to the stage of story selection on project 3. The previous exercises (Iraq and Afghanistan) worked well politically, I thought, because Nick and I were able to focus the coverage [and the resultant global coverage] on elements that it was highly in the public interest to make known.

With Afghanistan, this was civilian casualties. With Iraq, it was torture. This time, I think it’s also important that we try and major on stories that ought to be made known in the public interest. That was the compass-needle which helped me when I originally tried to put together the first dozen stories.

So – top stories revealing corruption and crime (Russia, Berlusconi, etc) and improper behaviour (eg unwarranted US pressure on other countries, unwarranted leaking to the US by other country officials). This will then position us where we can be best defended on all fronts??

A herd of publishable articles began to grow in size. The task of readying them for publication fell to Stuart Millar, the
Guardian
’s web news editor, who says he felt like a harried cowboy. “I was trying to lasso them into some kind of shape.” This was a far more complicated production problem than the similar exercise with the Iraq and Afghan war logs. At first, it had seemed the cables would yield just a hatful of stories. By the eve of D-day,
Guardian
journalists had produced more than 160 articles, with more coming in all the time. “There was a crazy, enormous heave of copy,” Millar recalls.

For Millar, as a web expert, it was clear that the emergence of the vast cables database marked the end of secrecy in the old-fashioned, cold-war-era sense. “The internet has rendered that all history,” he reflects. “For us, there was a special responsibility to handle the material carefully, and to bring context to the stories, rather than just dump them out.”

There were further concerns. The full text of relevant cables was intended to be posted online alongside individual news stories. This practice – what Assange called “scientific journalism” – was something the
Guardian
and some other papers had now been routinely doing for several years, ever since the technology had made it possible.

Each reporter was now made responsible for “redacting” their own cables – blanking out from the original any sources who might have been put at risk if their names were published. Heads of state, well-known politicians, those in public life generally, were fair game as a rule. In some parts of the world, however – the Middle East, Russia and central Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – to be seen even talking to the Americans was a risky proposition.

The cables team took a conservative approach. If there was seen to be a risk of someone being compromised, then the name was scrubbed out. This was at times frustrating: long, informative cables might be stripped down to a couple of dull paragraphs. But the alternative was far worse. Redactions were passed on to Jonathan Casson, the paper’s apparently miracle-working head of production, and his harassed-looking team, who set up camp in a neighbouring fourth-floor room normally used as a training suite. Rusbridger had suggested early on that each paper nominate a “redactions editor” to ensure a belt and braces approach to protecting sources. Now Casson worked brutally long days comparing the
Guardian
’s editing decisions with those of his counterparts, and considering the representations about particular cables from the US state department that were passed on by the
New York Times
. The task was made vastly more difficult by the journalists’ determination not to discuss cables on the phone or in emails; after his daily round of Skype calls with international partners, Casson would meticulously alter the colour of some of the 700 or so cables listed on a vast Google spreadsheet that only he could understand. He looked like a man close to the edge.

And then there were the legal risks. Could the
Guardian
be prosecuted under the British Official Secrets Act or the US Espionage Act? And, if so, would it have to hand over internal documents and emails? Rusbridger had already sought the opinion of Alex Bailin, a QC who specialised in secrecy law, ahead of publication of the Afghan war logs. There had been no prosecution. But this did not mean that the White House would necessarily acquiesce in the far more damaging publication of the secret US state department cables.

Geraldine Proudler, of the
Guardian
’s law firm, Olswang, had been full of forebodings. Ahead of the publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs she suggested it was “entirely possible” the US could bring a prosecution against the
Guardian
under the Espionage Act – though an all-out assault against the international media partners seemed unlikely. It was also possible the Americans could seek to lay hands on Rusbridger. “In a worst case scenario we cannot rule out extradition attempts.” At the least, it was “very likely” that the US might serve a subpoena demanding that the
Guardian
hand over material after publication, she had advised.

In addition to worrying about the risks of possible injunctions under the Official Secrets Act and the Espionage Act, Gill Phillips, the
Guardian
’s in-house head of legal, spent many hours weighing up the libel and privacy dangers: both were big problems domestically, because the UK lacked the free speech protections enshrined in the US constitution. The cables were fascinating, and credible as documents. They revealed international skullduggery and double-dealing, among other things. But the fact they had been written by US diplomats didn’t make them libel proof. Some of the cables from the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and Afghanistan made eye-popping assertions of top-level corruption, but could they land the
Guardian
with a costly writ? All had to be handled with care.

To a certain degree, Phillips could rely on the Reynolds defence, following a celebrated 1999 ruling that journalists were able to publish important allegations that could not be proved, so long as the material was in the public interest, the paper acted responsibly, and it followed proper journalistic procedures. (The case got its name after Albert Reynolds, the Irish premier, sued the London
Sunday Times
.) But the Reynolds judgment wasn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card; in some cases the
Guardian
had still, if necessary, to be able to prove in court the truth of what it had published.